Our Little Farm

So as promised, the story of our little farm continues...

On Monday, the 17th, we decided the time had come to finally plant the garden. Our planting season is a little different than that of Nevada in that we have to wait to plant after the frost zone passes, which is May 15th. Monday was a dreary and cold day. Everything was muddy and soaking wet. Great for cutting up the sod, not so great for picking up the sod and transporting it somewhere else. My job was to push the wheel barrow through the yard, past the neighbors house, and over to the empty lot and empty it. But I couldn't just discard muddy grass in a huge heaping pile because that would just look to ghetto. I mean, really, this is where we live, right? So I carefully removed every stinking piece of sod and turned it up right and laid them side by side. Alex thought I was nuts but I didn't mind because I didn't have to shovel up the sod. Here I am on my way back from the last load of sod.

Remember the little, pathetic patch I dug? It's nothing compared to what Alex did. The entire garden is a little more than 16 feet long and 8 feet wide.

Even though we dug out the sod we wanted to have a raised bed to grow all our vegetables in. To do that we needed a good border to hold all the dirt. Alex took our little hand-held shovel and dug a 4 inch border around the garden. We then headed over to Lowe's to grab all our supplies. We bought 15 bags of manure, 51 bags of black top soil (yes that's right- 51 bags!), 6 planter boxes, 27 tomato cages (two different sizes), vegetable fertilizer, and a massive piece of ply-wood that we had cut into 6 sections to box in the garden. It took us 7 trips to Lowe's to transport all of it home in our little Hyundai.

Here's the garden boxed in with 48 bags of black top soil waiting to be emptied.

And here's our 16x8 garden filled with wonderful black dirt.

We marked the sprinkler with an orange flag. By this time it was 8:30 at night. The sun had just set and we were pretty beat. Planting would have to wait for tomorrow and so will the rest of the story. :)